Story of Galway death spreads around the world

NEWS OF the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in Galway has spread around the world, predominantly led by social media as people shared the news and engaged in discussion and debate around the social, moral and legal issues.

An article covering the story on the BBC News site was the most-read on the broadcaster’s website all day and was featured on the main BBC homepage. Social-media news monitoring website NewsWhip said that in a three-hour period yesterday afternoon, the BBC article had been tweeted almost 1,000 times and Facebooked 8,600 times.

The story also led the front page of
Guardian.co.uk,
DailyMail.co.ukand
Mirror.co.ukas well as making the homepages of the US and UK editions of The Huffington Post and popular US-based women’s interest blog, Jezebel.

The reaction on Twitter led to two separate hashtags trending on Twitter in Ireland. Tweets using #savita and #ripsavita were used in excess of 15,000 times by yesterday afternoon.

The popular international social sharing website Reddit featured at least two references to the story on its homepage, with the World News, Feminist and Atheist Sub-Reddits garnering in excess of 1000 comments around the article linked to on
irishtimes.com.

The Irish Times’s own front-page story, published online last night just after midnight has been linked to more than 8,500 times on Twitter.

On Facebook, the article has been engaged with over 50,000 times, with 22,000 people engaging in discussion and commentary on the social networking website.